The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: Delegategate

Donald Trump reading and analyzing T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” at a campaign stop in Wisconsin on March 29.

The Trump Apocalypse Watch is a subjective daily estimate, using a scale of one to four horsemen, of how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering an apocalypse in which we all die.

Not-great news keeps breaking against Donald Trump without the accompanying polling and electoral successes that used to follow all the incidents that seemed like they would hurt his campaign. Today, the Daily Beast reported that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski called a former coworker a “fucking bitch” (a different allegation than the earlier report that he’d called a former coworker a “cunt”). The Trump campaign botched a chance to get delegates in Colorado because of logistical confusion. And an AP poll found that not only do 70 percent of Americans overall have an unfavorable view of Trump but that majorities of groups in nearly every subcategory of race, gender, political orientation, and geographic area—including Southerners and whites without college educations—view him unfavorably.

It’s gotten so dire that Slate’s Jacob Weisberg—proprietor of the Trumpcast—has moved on to trying to figure out how the Republican establishment will dispose of Trump’s failed campaign.

On the other side of the equation, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn did a careful breakdown of current delegate totals and polls in states that’ve yet to hold their primaries and concluded that it’s definitely still possible for Trump to win the Republican nomination via a majority of pledged convention delegates. He’ll have to maintain his current level of support in the Northeast, win a close contest in Indiana, and do very well in California, Cohn says—but it wouldn’t be that surprising, given current polls, if any of that happened.

Could one foresee a scenario in which Trump bounces back via big victories in his native Northeast, fires Lewandowski, stops getting bogged down in negative back-and-forths, and upsets Hillary Clinton (a relatively unpopular candidate herself) in the general election after leveraging her careful rhetoric and establishment credentials against her in the debates like he did with Jeb Bush? Sure, I guess. Still, I’m lowering the Trump Apocalypse Watch level to …

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons